1 Five million euros is five million euros. The State Lottery, which was the main sponsor of the month-long celebration of Macedonia’s 35 years of independence, is a state-owned company. That five million euros belongs to the company’s owner. And the owner of the “State Lottery” is us—the taxpayers.

Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski tells us that we paid zero denars for the celebration that cost five million euros. That this money isn’t money. Why? Because the payment didn’t come out of the state budget. That money was still sitting as profit in the state-owned company and hadn’t yet made its way into the budget.

Now, the Government we elected to manage our money decided to spend the state-owned company’s unallocated profit on the 35th-anniversary celebration instead of paying it into the budget. And that in itself isn’t the issue. We celebrated for a whole month in town squares across the country.

So what’s the issue?

The issue is why they persistently concealed the cost of the celebration when they already knew it would amount to “zero denars”. They could’ve told us back in May, when Government spokesperson Marija Miteva promised to provide information on all the details “in a proper and dignified manner”.

The issue is why, if the celebration cost zero denars, the organising company, the only one to apply to the State Lottery’s tender, which was open for five working days, made fools of us for asking how much of our money they intended to spend.

And finally, after David Guetta’s spectacular concert on 8 September, why did the Prime Minister try to convince us that five million euros amounted to zero denars?

Either way, our money was spent.

2 The driver of the Government’s Secretary-General, Igor Janushev, accepted a bribe of 1,500 euros to secure someone a job as a firefighter with the Fire Protection Brigade, boasting that he had influence within the City of Skopje. Janushev distanced himself from the man, stating that he had worked for him for only six months and had previously driven other state officials.

Where does a state official’s driver get the power to promise jobs that require the highest levels of training and professionalism? Where does he get the nerve to demand money? We only found out about this case because someone reported it. Being a firefighter requires heart and courage, and someone finally reached their breaking point. But how many others lack the heart and courage to speak out? How many drivers of state and public officials wield the influence to secure jobs? If a driver can boast about having the power to hire people, what are we to think of the “elite” they drive around?

You can’t let the system be brought down by just anyone who lands a state job as a reward for party loyalty. Fire them and let them spend some time in prison. Even if they belong to a coalition partner, like that director of the Agriculture Agency who was walking around with 50,000 euros in the garages of the building where the former Minister of Agriculture lived.

If you have to pay some driver just to get a job as a firefighter, then they shouldn’t even bother telling first-graders to ask their parents for a baby brother or sister. Why would they have more children, and why would they raise them? So there’s someone to pay off officials’ chauffeurs for jobs that actually require the highest qualifications?

3 It’s a defeat for humanity that the Serbian government welcomed war criminal Ratko Mladić, convicted of crimes against humanity and the Srebrenica genocide during the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, upon his release from prison in The Hague and buried him as a hero. This wasn’t some distant genocide, happening somewhere else, sometime long ago. It was a genocide committed during a war we witnessed with our own eyes, a war that caused suffering to our relatives, friends, colleagues and acquaintances with whom we had once lived in the same country. And it wasn’t in some distant past, it was now. Only about thirty years have passed, we’re still living witnesses to that war. Some of us are still in touch with the refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina who found sanctuary in our Macedonia back then.

That’s precisely why I found it so horrifying that, at the very moment we were celebrating our independence, Macedonia too played a part in that failure of humanity unfolding in Serbia, because some of our own state officials hailed the convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić as a hero. Yet the Prime Minister, instead of immediately dismissing them from their positions, positions we didn’t even know existed, simply remained silent.

But then again, a coalition is worth more than a genocide conviction.

It’s strange how Mickoski constantly speaks of the “dregs of society”. Yet he fails to see the dregs within his own government.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski